Blog

The most effective employee engagement programs recognize their employees for good work behavior. Deciding how to incentivize your employees is a whole other story and gets quite complicated. Employee of the month programs, quotas, customer satisfaction scores and employee evaluations can be great tactics to incentivize, but why should someone be recognized exactly and how should that affect your budget?

Most organizations focus on three universal goals: sales, employee turnover and customer service. By creating smart goals and allocating your employee recognition budget around the metrics of Performance, Employee Tenure and Customer Satisfaction scores you are able to ensure a holistic and integrated plan that drives results down to the bottom line.

Performance

Employee incentives based on measurable performance activities reinforces your organizations focus on productivity through a Pay for Performance model. Employee contests that measure a specific result such as 'weekly sales' are a great way to boost employee motivation. If 'weekly sales' is too general a metric you can break down the activities that generate your productivity goal and measure those.

For example, if you are running a customer service call center you would measure these 3 characteristics:

1. Tickets Solved
2. Time to First Reply
3. Ticket Resolution Time Average

You can then easily rank all of your employees on these three metrics by offering a small gift like a $10 Starbucks Gift Card or issue points that employees can redeem at the end of the month like in the automated Reward giving CrewHu Store.

Tenure

Allocating a part of your engagement budget to mark milestones for employee tenure (such as monthly, quarterly and annual) is another key way that you can lower employee turnover. Using a simple tenure tracking system that is transparent and consistent will allow you to reduce employee turnover by offering a path to promotion. When using a tenure system there are 2 primary rules that one should follow:

1. Tenure is never to be used as the sole criteria for promotion. In our career ladder we use tenure with an employee score (the crewHu score) and an employee performance rating. Tenure alone isn’t enough.
2. Tenure is to be used equitably. Read How to Retain Great Employees to Learn more.

There are several characteristics that affect tenure in the workplace.  According to the United States Department of Labor women tend to enjoy longer tenure (7 years) in architecture and engineering while men in food preparation and serving-related occupations suffer the shortest (2.3 years). For more insights into tenure across the United States read through the infographic below.

Customer Satisfaction

Rewarding employees who consistently get good feedback through rate your experience, survey cards or any other customer service management tactic ensures that your whole team is focusing on the customer experience. Using technology that measures customer service automatically is a great way to get this information and recognize your top performers immediately. Software like Zendesk have even integrated a user-specific satisfaction rating metric into their system to allow managers like you to easily measure employee customer service  performance.

Conclusion

Ultimately, when navigating the hundred of different rewards, identifications and recognition options for your employees keep in mind that the focus should be on creating an engagement and incentivization system that motivates employees to perform, stay with your company longer and always strive to give superior customer service. Using automated technologies that help you measure and manage your SMART goals will put you on the light speed track to becoming the manager of the year and building a culture that your employees are excited to thrive within.